I am very new to bird photography and only really have the one telephoto lens at the moment so I apologize for the blurry photos here.

Anyway, I'm in Scotland and down near the River Ayr, South Ayrshire and my mom grew up reading all sorts of bird and animal books. So really if I see a bird while I'm out walking my dog and come home and describe it to her she will almost 100% of the time be able to name the bird from description alone and find a picture of it in our bird book and it will be correct.

So when we seen a couple of these wee birds at the start of December she was actually surprised to not know what they were. Since then I have been on the hunt with my camera daily to try and get a photo of one of them to see if we had a better chance at seeing what it was... unfortunately we're still stumped.

It is very small and very skittish so trying to get close to it without it diving away has been very difficult but today I managed to get a few photos of it before I lost it completely.

I really hope someone can help us identify this little creature because we're pretty sure it's not a local bird but google searches have proved a bit fruitless as all we know about it is that it's small, brown, looks like a duck and dives under the water XD

I'll upload the other photos I got of it today, one has a mallard just at the edge of the photo which will properly indicate it's tiny size for you guys. Really hoping I can finally get an answer to what this one is to inform my mom too ^_^

Steph

Steph

Posted
04-Jan-2017 14:56

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04-Jan-2017

5

Me again, couldn't see how to edit my post but it's probably cause I'm on my IPAD and not a computer XD

Anyway, uploaded the other photos here please take a look and hopefully someone will know what this bird is.

Funnily enough my mom thought it could be a grebe way back when we first seen them, but dismissed it as she thought that grebes were usually larger in size. Wait until I tell her she almost had it XD

I'm so glad to finally know what it is and upon looking up a little grebe online I see that it has very bright plumage in the summer months, so I bet we've came across the right bird and then dismissed it due to the colours not matching without even thinking that it could have different summer/winter feathers.

They must be quite new to this stretch of the river as we have been coming here since I was a child and have never seen them before. I really hope we get a few more and maybe a chance to see them with their summer plumage and possibly some lil chicks come breeding season.